In your home office – internet connectivity is the second most

important utility, right behind electrical power. When you do fall off the grid, however, the best way to not completely loose it is to have a plan in

place. I have four stages of redundancy to make sure I can always hit the net before I give up and miss a demo – your sales team will appreciate it!

1) Power down and reset everything. About half of the broadband outages are resolved by reconnecting to the service. If that

doesn’t work, most likely these days there is an outage – and most providers don’t even notice an outage until they get 10% reported down on a node.

Keep your provider on speed dial on your mobile or non-VOIP phone, just to check, then when they tell you it will be next week before they can roll a

truck, politely make the appointment and move on to step 2 below.
2) Scan the airwaves! Just right click on your wireless

networking icon and choose “view available wireless networks”.

src=”http://www.softwaresalesengineering.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/wifi%20nets.gif” />

Read the rest of this entry »

Having a pre-packaged canned demo laying around can be super-

useful. It doesn\’t replace a good, old fashioned live demo, but it\’s another tool in the toolbox. Canned demo\’s don\’t break in front of

the customer, they can be on-demand on a website, CD, or even sent through email. They can play unattended at trade shows, like a commercial, catching

the eye of a passerby and initiating an introduction for you.

Slideshows

muvee : autoproducer

If you don’t own a pair, you aren’t a road warrior. There. I

said it.

Noise cancelling headphones don’t actually cancel all noise out. They work by sensing a noise via the external microphone, then

transmitting an equal but opposite noise in the earphone speaker – therefore ‘cancelling’ out the noise that would otherwise enter your ear. Pretty

cool. However, they only work within certain frequencies, so human speach for instance still comes through… boo! They work best on consistant

noise, such as the hum of a jet engine.

Read the rest of this entry »

Remember the days of having to physically meet with people? Flying

in to see some random potential client who may or may not have any idea what your software does is a very expensive way to pre-qualify an account. How

did businesses survive?

Today we have another tool in the toolbox – online meetings. Don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely still a need to

meet face to face, and I’ve never seen a sale occur without an in-person meeting. However, we can use online meeting services to cheaply pre-qualify

accounts. Make sure your potential customers understand what you do before spending thousands to send a team across the country or across the world.Â

That makes good business sense to me.

Read the rest of this entry »

I use Microsoft Virtual PC to create virtual machines for my various

software demonstrations. In the past, I have used VMware Workstation, but I found the Microsoft product has more straitforward virtual networking

setup options, which ultimately means that it is less customizable, but it works just fine for sharing network adapters with the host operating system,

which is perfect for me.

Important to note, there are two different types of Virtual Machine products out there – Desktop and Server.

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the Software Sales Engineering blog. I hope that this

will become a resource for “All Things Sales Engineering”. From discussions on tools and practices, tips on road warrior life and customer horror

stories, I would like to see this site become an entertaining and educational tool for anyone faced with the daunting task of engineering the technical

side of selling software.

Read the rest of this entry »